If you have ever spent countless minutes typing “speak to a human” into a chatbot that keeps cheerfully offering to reset your password, you are not alone.
CHOICE, Australia’s leading independent consumer advocacy group, surveyed more than 1,000 people. Less than ten percent believe artificial intelligence has made products and services better and the majority say it has made customer service worse.
Just under half believe AI is making scams more common, while seventy per cent say businesses should not be trusted to use AI however they see fit.
CHOICE senior campaigns and policy advisor Jordan Cornelius said many people remained deeply sceptical.
“AI could result in one of the biggest shifts in power away from consumers we’ve seen,” she said.
She warned that scammers are already using AI to create deepfake videos, cloned voices and fake advertisements.
“We’re already seeing the disastrous impacts AI can have on consumers,” she said.
CHOICE wants stronger laws. These include a ban on businesses using personal information to set individual prices and tougher privacy protections.
consumersinternational.com)
It also wants AI chatbots and online marketplaces brought under scam prevention rules.
For me, this story is personal. My late father, Peter Mahoney, was the editor of CHOICE in the late 1960s.
Back then, CHOICE was the magazine and the Australian Consumers Association was its owner.
Today the organisation and the magazine both go by the name CHOICE.
In those early years, the Association led successful campaigns to ban flammable nightwear, toy guns that could blind children and plastic stools capable of impaling people – as well as warning of the shortcomings of various motor vehicles.
Today’s dangers may be digital rather than physical, but the fight is the same.
Frustrating chatbots are one thing.
But consumers are not the only ones weighing up whether AI makes life better or just easier.
In my profession, that question cuts both ways.
I confess AI has made research far easier.
Hours of digging now take minutes, with a tireless assistant that never asks for a coffee break.
But the same tool can write the whole thing: the article, the essay, the report, even the email to your boss explaining why the report is late.
The temptation is real for a paid writer on deadline, a student at 2am with an assignment due at nine, or a worker drowning in emails.
Yet writing is thinking.
Crafting our own words tests our ideas and makes us accountable for them.
What you shouldn’t rely on are the many programs that claim to tell whether a document was written by a person or by ChatGPT.
Their accuracy is questionable, and it is hard not to suspect they exist mainly to tempt people into buying them. They are close to useless.
So let AI do the heavy lifting on research. The thinking, the heart and the honesty should remain with the writer.
And if a chatbot ever connects you to a real person on the first try, please let me know.
That would be front-page news in this great new publication!
